Joyce Rothman: A new year and a new way of living with cancer

Friday

Dec 30, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2011 at 1:45 PM

When cancer reflects on the new year, will it lighten or darken my days to come? Right now, I’m feeling OK but what if my health worsens? It may. Or it may not and as much as I’m trying to sway the outcome, I don’t know if I’ll be successful.

Joyce Rothman

When cancer reflects on the new year, will it lighten or darken my days to come? Right now, I’m feeling OK but what if my health worsens? It may. Or it may not and as much as I’m trying to sway the outcome, I don’t know if I’ll be successful.

So what do I do when my future is iffy? I do the only thing I know and that is to stay in the present moment where I know all I need to know. OK. My moments now hold promise and hope for stability. I feel better than I have, I’m taking better care of myself than in the past, my family is well and my column/blog is growing. People tell me that I’m inspiring them and life feels so very sweet. My moments now feel pretty good and it’s easy to influence my intention for the new year, but what if I wasn’t doing that great? And what about people who are struggling and disheartened with their current moments; how can they look at the new year with hope?

I’m going to ask for divine guidance for answers to these very hard questions. (I ask for help and write in a stream of consciousness. It is unedited and I write the words one at a time as they come into my head, I’ve come to believe that they come from a higher source because the guidance is much wiser than my other thoughts.)

Please tell us what we need to know about finding hope and feeling love and gratitude in spite of our toughest challenges.

You are wise to ask for the answers since they are within each and every one of you. Hope, love and gratitude aren’t elusive. They are not some far-off pipe dream. They are there now if you just ask to see and feel them. They are waiting to be found and once found, they come to life and carry you along within their energy. Like turning on the ignition of a car to get to your destination, you only need to ask to turn it on.

When they are awakened within, they need expression. Like putting your foot on the gas pedal to fuel the car, you must see, hear, feel and show hope, love and gratitude. Say it, write it, show it. It will fire you up to possibilities and bring you more of the same. Your energy will shift from what you lack to all you have. And that brings even more. You hear of the law of attraction. You hear about an attitude of gratitude or that love conquers all. Those are not empty concepts. They are full of truths. The more you recognize and act on them, the more often they occur.

People far worse off may live with more hope, love and gratitude, just by having the awareness. And people who have so much more can actually feel very hopeless if they chose to stay closed off from love and gratitude.

A new year is one of possibilities, just as each moment is. You have the capacity to create the moments to bring you to where you want to go. So think carefully about that, then buckle your seat belt, turn the key and ride off into the new year because you have the choice to find riches of the highest kind; the ones that come from within ourselves where our divine essence resides. When we connect with it, it connects us to everything else that is also divine, where life gives us the light to outshine darkness. It’s where we find the very best of ourselves, each other, life and all that is.

When you say “happy new year,” think about all it can mean and how you can make it really happy. Happy new year.

Hope, love and gratitude is within us; we only have to acknowledge it and act on it. Let’s see; I feel hopeful that my chemo pills, Tarceva, are working and even if they’re not, that something else will. I’m hopeful that my cancer will shrink or stay stable because I’m eating a vegetarian diet and getting better at it all the time. I just added wheatgrass to my green juicing and am falling in love with sunflower sprouts. They’re crunchy, neutral tasting and alive; full of enzymes, chlorophyll and vitamins. They’re nourishing my cells. I’m reading Kris Carr’s “Crazy, Sexy, Diet” book and am actually getting excited about how food, exercise and meditation can have such a huge impact on my health. It’s really not complicated or difficult either. By getting off my behind and improving little by little each day, I stand as much a chance as anyone else to control my disease and continue to live life.

I love that I’m finding so many ways to feel love; it’s all around me now that I’m open to it. Love is coming back tenfold; from people I know and those I don’t. When I get into bed at night, I’ve gotten into the habit of visualizing myself connected to the warm light of love and letting myself feel it surrounding and infusing me. I am grateful that my writing continues to keep me on track each time I veer off. And I’m so grateful to discover and experience how wonderfully simple it is to have the best that life can offer.

This is going to be a happy new year, and my intention, my resolution is to take some time each day, no matter if it’s a tough one, and remember to ask for and act on the hope, love and gratitude that are inside of me. I wish you the very best of intentions for the happiest 2012, too. With lots of hope, love and gratitude, Joyce.

Joyce Rothman of Massachusetts, a nurse for 40 years, was diagnosed with lung and pancreatic cancer in July 2010. Since then, she has been writing about her diagnosis, her treatment and her outlook on the process, in hopes of helping others. Follow her journey at http://makingsenseofitall.joycerothman.com.

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